Seagate sata drives

[uberplasma]

Hi everyone
Bell just swapped out my old PVR receivers with 2 new ones and I find myself with 2 500G hard drives that I figure would be great in my raid array, but I can't get my computer to see the drive, read a very brief article about ATA3 security or something, any ideas on how to unlock the drives? they are plain old seagate sata drives, no jumpers. I may have posted this in the wrong area, but you never know
cheers
Dave

[b700029]

Maybe they really are defective. Do they get detected at all?

Software like MHDD will be able to get the real status of the drives, it can show things like the security status. Even if there is a password set, and I guess you don't have any data on them you need to keep, you can issue a secure erase command to clear everything including the password.

[uberplasma]

Hi
no they were functioning fine, bell just stopped using those PVR's. I did have the Hendrix at woodstock in it's entirety that I wouldn't mind getting off but i guess I could wipe em, thanks for the info

[Sparks88]

use the seagate test "seatools" program to "write zero"'s to complete drive and then format using same program and the drives should be visible, you will have to connect the drives to your pc and reboot then depending which version you use dos or windows erase the whole of the drives, just make sure that you dont have a seagate drive already in your system and you erase the wrong one, i use the dos version and disconnect all the other system drives so i dont erase the wrong drive.

[shovenose]

Damn, I wrote a huge reply and it never showed up
I'm not not goign to type this all over again...
Go to Computer Management then Disk Management on the right side, Initialize any disks that need it then format

[999999999]

What does "can't get the computer to see the drives" mean? It can't detect there are drives at all in the bios menus or bios post/enumeration screen, OR that the operating system doesn't see them? Not to be pedantic but for clarity the latter would better be described as the computer can see the drives but the OS can't see any partitions (or volume or filesystem, depending on what you're looking at in the OS).

[heavymachines]

hook the hdd to a computer that is already set up initialize drive then format it and it should see it if not hdd is junk or needs a firmware update...

[severach]

Originally Posted by Sparks88

use the seagate test "seatools" program to "write zero"'s

I use Western Digital's WinDLC. It runs in Windows which is much faster than any DOS program and it shows name and serial so you know you are erasing the right drive.

My drive dock is right in front of me so I can hear it. I can tell if a drive is bad while zeroing from the noises it makes.